[QUOTE=chowder]
OK I do understand that back in those days there was a far smaller population than there is now, that towns were (sometimes) quite lawless, that you could go for days withour seeing another person, the US had /was just recovering from a disastrous civil war. All of this I’m OK with.
However, and I speak as a Briton, it appears to my possibly uneducated eyes that lawlessness was accepted as part and parcel of life in those times. This I find very hard to comprehend.
Surely to Og there must have been people out there who abhored the way things were, who thoroughly detested the “shoot 'em up, gun 'em down” way of life.
Despite all this, outlaws abounded, people were killed by the dozen, trains, coaches, banks etc were held up and robbed and this went on and on.
Why?
Not all the outlaws were war heroes or latter day Robin Hoods. Some were out and out cold blooded killers
[/QUOTE]
Well you have to remember the type of people who settled out west. They were the sort that were trying to escape ‘The Man’, in some way or another. To Homestead rather than work in a factory or on a plantation back east. They were a fiercely independent sort. It’s not that there were not people who cared about law and order, it’s just that it was a frontier being vanguarded by desperate settlers. The wealthy who came in to establish claims on large ranches and mineral resources, were not always so kind to the locals. The Pinkertons, who were a mercenary outfit that brought law and order to the people. That law was generally represented as corporate interests. Get the full series of Deadwood and watch that to get a glimpse of the why of it.
In the case of Jesse James, he was a war hero. In the case of Billy the Kid, he was a charming guy, who was generally very nice to the folks in the area where he was. He found himself on the wrong side of a war between two ranch families, and as a result, his side was named outlaws by the Governor of New Mexico Lew Wallis, and he was hunted down by the Sheriff Pat Garrett. So it’s hard to say that law and order wasn’t there. Ultimately Billy the Kid, was got by the law. When Billy the Kid lived, New Mexico was still a territory, not even a state yet. It wasn’t made a state until 1912. As such it has been a state for less than a century. It takes time to build a civil infrastructure. If it helps you to understand, New Mexico territory was larger than France, and went from scorching deserts in what is today Arizona, to 10-12000 foot peaks in Colorado, to salt flats in Utah, and the Rio Grande valley in New Mexico. You’re talking about a million square km’s of area with less than a million people.
Even today there is a strong live and let die, libertarian mindset out west. It was much more prevalent in the days before the Social Security Administration, and Medicaid. You’d have to understand the mindset of someone willing to leave civilization for the badlands in order to form a life for themselves, to really understand the culture of it.
Go up into the desert, get a house way out there. Sit on the front porch, and imagine how long it might take the police to get 45 miles from the nearest town to you, if an armed robber came into your home. Then imagine the police were on horses, and there was no such thing as 911.
If you think of it as there was a Bell Curve of real true Outlaw lawlessness as it moved to new territory and Settlement and Civilization came & pushed out bad guys - there was no real long, long period in any place with sizable population without Law.